Seizure (Part V)

This is a continuation. To start from the beginning, click here.

A painting hung on the wall above the couch. It was Thomas Kinkade’s Cobblestone Bridge. As a rule, Tess had always found motel and bank art contemptible—it was the maudlin nadir of contemporary vulgar kitsch. She could not look away. It appeared as if the elements of the painting were moving and that, in addition to the swaths of pigment burning afterimages onto her retinas, so it seemed, the glow from the house in the painting was escaping from off the canvas into the room, cascading onto and pooling around Amanda in an effervescent pool of light, and immolating her senses and stymieing her every impulse to move. What sublime beauty she now beheld! Before long she felt tears running down her cheeks, began to shake, and started gasping for air as if she were drowning.

“I don’t think she’s staring at it because she likes it. I think she’s having some sort of attack, like she said,” Maggie seemed to say, from somewhere distant, as if she were shouting from the bottom of a very deep pit.

“I think we should slap her.”

“You’re not touching her.”

“What should we do then?”

“I think we better just wait.”

“‘We better just wait?’”

“I think it’s like sleepwalking. I think I heard somewhere that you don’t want to try to wake them up. It looks like she’s starting to come out of it.”

“And you said you were fine with her driving,” Amanda scoffed.

“If I had known this might happen, don’t you think I would said differently?”

“If this had happened when she was driving, we’d all be dead right now.”

“You’re being overdramatic. Look, she’s coming around.”

Tess waved off Maggie’s helping hands, wiped her brow clear of sweat, and sat down in the chair Maggie had vacated. The world was coming back into focus, muted and duller to the power of ten and worse off for it. What once had been a pyrogenic shearing of the color spectrum was now a cloying, saccharine, ordinary painting. Amanda, whom Tess had always held up as a standard of beauty, who moments before bathed in the nimbus of an archangel, now seemed plain, even ugly.

“We lost you for a few minutes,” Maggie said with a mixture of concern and relief.

Tess forced a smile.

“I guess I won’t be driving anymore.”

“No. You won’t.” Maggie’s lustrous chestnut hair, her best feature, fell against Tess as she tended to her. Now it felt like coarse dry straw.

“So everything’s good here?” Amanda said, unzipping her suitcase.

“The pool is open until eleven.” Maggie did not have to look to know that Amanda was getting out her precious white bikini. “Not rushing off to slut it up with strange boys doesn’t make you uncool; staying here with Tess would make you a good sister. Then again, you shouldn’t let your sister’s medical condition get in the way of your social life.”

“I know I’m not as perfect as you are, but bitch, don’t tell me I’m not a good sister—”

“Go ahead and go. Don’t pretend like you’re not going to. Tess and I will stay here and play gin.”

Amanda went into the bathroom to change.

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